The supreme court’s unanimous decision to rule the Rwanda asylum deal unlawful is humiliating for the government. Not only for its immigration policy, but for the whole Conservative project from Boris Johnson to Rishi Sunak, which has combined contempt for human rights with breathtaking incompetence. The policy is not just morally objectionable but stupid.
The issue before the court today was, at heart, a simple one. Does the UK have the right to place refugees – people who have fled war, persecution, torture or worse – at risk of being sent back to the countries they fled? The judges were clear: no, it does not. Contrary to what you might read in the rightwing press, this isn’t only because of the European convention on human rights or its UK counterpart, the Human Rights Act. The judges stressed that a whole set of international treaties, including the UN Refugee Convention, as well as multiple UK laws on asylum and immigration, prohibit the practice, which is known officially as refoulement (the act of forcing a refugee to return to a place from which he or she is seeking asylum).
